Nat Hentoff | Criticism

Mr. Hentoff's book [The New Equality] is the most sophisticated gloss of the [Civil Rights] Movement to date. So keen is his sensibility, so evident his intimacy with what's going on, and, most important, so pertinent are his suggestions for social action that The New Equality, for all its brevity, stands almost alone … among the flood of recent books on the subject. One has confidence that Hentoff really understands what Negroes are feeling.

But a further distinction is that his account traces the intellectual evolution of the Movement's leadership and the concurrent criticism of "outside" observers. Hentoff's style is to counterpunch. He makes his points by scoring off the inadequacies of such commentators as Norman Mailer, Norman Podhoretz of Commentary and John Fischer of Harper's. Sometimes he misreads Fischer. Yet his pinpointed charges of naïveté and condescension are mostly telling.